


Machine and Meat

by HVK



Category: DCU, Justice League
Genre: Angst, Cyborgs, Friendship, Gen, Heroism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Inspiration, Light Angst, Transhumanism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 07:55:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1810984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HVK/pseuds/HVK
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Sometimes I think... maybe Victor Stone really did die on that table, and I'm just a machine that thinks it's Victor Stone."</p>
<p>It's a question that haunts Cyborg, the possibility that he's just carrying out a masquerade of being a boy who's been dead for a long time now. Wonder Woman, not exactly one for the 'it's not really a person if it's a robot' mentality, offers him a counterpoint: with the things he's done, the kind of man he is, and his self-appointed role in life, would that be such a bad thing?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Machine and Meat

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired after I saw Justice League: War and thought about Cyborg angsting out his issues with Wonder Woman.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own Justice League or any elements of the DCU.

Wonder Woman is not, at heart, a patient woman. She is a warrior, and indeed made to fight.

_Made_ is the right word. She was not born in the same manner as most of her allies and friends - and indeed, _most_ is probably the accurate word - and was literally molded into life. From clay she had been forged, to clay she suspected she would return when the spark of life left her at the end of all things. Yet, even so, she was trained for battles on all fields; of sword and fist, yes. Of late, she has instructed herself in the weaponry of the world outside Paradise Island; of firearms that spit lead like thunderbolts and mechanisms that bring power to those who had little to begin with. And in the company of her new pantheon, she knows better now the battles that rearrange the landscape, glorious and terrible to behold.

And she also knows the battles waged with will and perspective along, challenged and equaled by the others. She suspected that it was the meaning of word-battles to not dominate, but to come to agreement and meld viewpoints.

In her own way, she had become a counselor of sorts to her friends. She had not expected this. She wouldn't have... welcomed it, exactly. But it was a useful thing to do.

So. She sat there, and waited patiently for the hulking boy - and he was a boy, really, not quite biologically old enough to be a man, certainly too young to bear the confusions that tormented him - to gather his thoughts.

His head tilted up, and it creaked. Not like gears grinding, nothing so crude. But there was a noise, and the only word for it was _mechanical._ She had known of Hephaestus and his work since she was small; she knew well of automatons and what modern humanity called robots; even machine-beings that could think and feel and be much as any human would be.

Her friend was rather a different like of them. Nevertheless, she saw a certain kinship between him and them.

"I flat-lined on that table then," Cyborg finally said, and it came out like a confession, something that he hardly dared even think about. To speak it was a victory unto itself. "I was _gone,_ do you get it? I was clinically dead for a few minutes. Long time. Too long, probably." His organic eye blinked. "I don't know…"

"Know what?" Wonder Woman said, waiting for him to reach whatever thought process he had running.

He didn't say anything for a moment, staring at his hands. They flexed, smooth and clicking faintly.

"I catch myself looking in the mirror, and I blink, and it doesn't feel right. Blinking. I look at my eye, and watch muscles twitch, and it feels _wrong._ Like it's not even me there. Just some aberration that shouldn't be there. Something I should have fixed already."

He turned.

Red eye glowing faintly, steadily. Very much unlike his organic eye, faltering and afraid.

"I'm thinking, maybe Victor Stone really did die on that table."

"You speak of him as though he were someone else," Wonder Woman said.

"Yeah. I do." Cyborg stared some more at himself. "I was out on that table for too long before I came up. My brain was mostly okay, even before it got converted. Memories are just data, mostly, in the meat. Probably, if something accessed them and didn't have anything there to begin with, they'd feel like the real thing."

"Ah," Wonder Woman said, knowingly, but keeping her own counsel.

"I think maybe, the real Victor Stone _did_ die on that table, and I'm a robot lugging what's left of his meat around and thinking I used to be him." Cyborg let out a gusty sigh, vibrating against components in his throat.

Wonder Woman was practical, in her own way. "Would it matter if you were?" She said simply.

A grinding creak, almost fluid like notes of music. "Say what?" He said, sharply.

"You are," she said, simply. "Whatever that is, it matters little. I didn't know Victor Stone, whether he was you or not. But I know you. So I ask you; would it really matter to _you,_ here and now, if you're Victor Stone with a new lease on life… or Cyborg remembering what it was like to be weak in body and thus what its like for the humanity you protect? Would either one make you any less of a person who thinks and feels and _is?_ "

"…I guess not," Cyborg said, with some reluctance, but the beginnings of the faintest smile.

"Meditate on it," she advised. "It may help."


End file.
